Eko Interactive Sound Design

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New Hardware & VR Audio….Are we there yet?

Tis the season for some of us to start thinking about upgrading our workstations. Those of us W-9 freelance types have till December 31st to get in that 2016 write-off & / or counter our earnings with business spend.

 

Luckily, both Microsoft & Apple have made it very easy to part with our hard earned cash by introducing the Surface Studio & the new Macbook Pro. If you’re like me and you do (or plan to) make the majority of your earnings doing VR audio, would either of these machines be worthy of their 4-figure investment?

 

First of all, can either of these machines run VR? The answer is unfortunately, for the most part, no. You can run mobile VR on both, but as implied by the definition, you’d eventually be publishing to a mobile device. It’s the computing equivalent of shake weights vs. the heavy lifting required to run a Vive or Oculus.

 

In addition to processing power, the video card is what makes or breaks VR compatibility. After all, running duel 4k display monitors at 90+ fps requires some real horse power and neither the Surface Studio nor the Macbook Pro have it.

 

Surface Studio runs on a GeForce 980m, a really good mobile video card, but not good enough for VR power-towers. Mac is running on the AMD Radeon Pro 450 or 460, again great for gaming, but not quite there yet for VR.

 

Bummer? Well maybe, but not really in today’s workflow. Most interactive audio folks have two machines, so an all-in-one solution isn’t really in the cards yet. There are some exceptions.

 

I know of some teams who are running a decked out version of Nuendo or Adobe suite with all the VST plug-ins you could ask for on the same giant Ed 209 looking box  that houses their blinged out Titan X graphics card, but they’re the exception to the rule. Besides, since both Digital Audio Workstations & VR displays are CPU hogs, putting all that computing on one machine has diminishing returns.

 

It seems counterintuitive but in some ways it’s better to have two $2500 boxes than one $5k box that runs everything at once. It’s also a way to separate church and state or in this case, the creative and technical. Interactive audio folks I know are comfortable letting their right brain create on a Mac & their left brain implement on a PC.

 

So, what about Microsoft’s pitch to the creative audience? I watched their 10/26 keynote again & I love their message. I love that this is hardware for the future generation of creators. I love that they’re pushing 3D for everyone and I love the potential of the Surface dial, or any non-keyboard / mouse interface for that matter. Microsoft is well on their way to an all-in one solution and with their (albeit confusing) enterance into the VR headset world, they are poised to get there first.

 

For audio however, it will still be a bit. To make full use of their surface dial, Microsoft needs a 2nd party developer (like Apple has Logic or Roli) to work exclusively in the hardware & make it sing (pun intended). Their keynote mentioned a composer who works exclusively on Surface using the stylus pen and a music teacher who DJs on the weekend but I only saw examples of visual applications that showcased their dial / studio.

 

Apple on the other hand had me opening my wallet when they showed that DJ set using the touch bar as a filter sweep, x-fade and a number of other assignable parameter controls. Corny, maybe, but it was an interesting baby step for Apple since everyone thought they would ‘me-too’ Microsoft by introducing full touch. I can say that it might be a smarter move to for Apple to do one thing well rather than mimic something that they don’t have a comprehensive plan for.

 

A touch bar that works 90% of the time is better than a touch screen that responds 70% of the time. While Microsoft has some very deliberate intentions for its touch screen models across Windows 10 development, it makes sense for Apple to distance themselves from that path for now instead of jumping on the bandwagon.

 

Back to VR development, Palmer Lucky had some not-so-nice things to say about Apple & running (or rather not running) VR from a Mac. The fact is that Apple is such a bespoke ecosystem that it makes sense for them to wait and introduce their own AR / VR device, one that’s designed from the ground up within the Apple environment. Besides, those that want to run a Vive on a Macbook seem pretty niche compared to those who want to say, make a dope beat in Garage Band.

 

If PC is the way to go to run VR, how can we, a-hem, scratch the surface (get it?) and get a machine powerful enough, yet elegant enough to not want to hide it under the desk next to the literal trash can? There are new middle-school solutions out there that offer customizable yet compact / sexy chassis. PCs from companies like Falcon Northwest can run the pixles out of some VR & yet fit in your carry-on for a client flight in a pinch.

 

How about PC laptop solutions? Well, there are some, but besides being 13 pounds and as big as many current desktops, most of them are geared toward the hardcore gamer. If you’re concerned with aesthetics, you may not want a neon pink dragon laser sketched onto your laptop cover that makes you seem like you just stole it from the props department of the live action remake of Akira.

 

Sometime down the road, this will all be moot & we’ll be running audio applications seamlessly in VR using a server hub interface that looks like a glass salad bowl & opens and closes the data pipeline depending on the usage we pay for per household. Until then though, we’re still confined to keyboards, screens and mice with occasional toe-dips into the pool of alternative user interfaces.

 

For me, I’m already running my audio software and hardware though an iMac so odds are I’ll plunk down for a mid-level 15” Macbook Pro. It just makes sense for me to make a redundant workspace, especially if I get more away gigs. After that I will probably invest in a custom Falcon Northwest Tiki with an NVidia 1080 video card, or the price equivalent of what’s available when I can afford (or justify) it.

 

That being said, if I were still working at Microsoft, I would be tempted to use that employee discount for a Surface Studio, or at least fight hard to convince my team to spend some of the fiscal budget on one for my office. ?

3D Music: Presence Beats Fidelity

The new buzz to come out of the VR audio space is 3D music, that is, music that takes advantage of the 360 degree spatial sound available through VR headsets and advanced audio algorithms.

We’re beginning to see audio solutions decouple from head mounted displays in the form of Ossic Headphones and other audio only endeavors. We know 3D music production isn’t far behind.

If you do a search on this subject at the moment there’s a surprising amount of skepticism, especially from the audiophile community.

This is most likely due to lack of VR exposure coupled with the failure of previous hi-def audio formats that have plagued the audiophile community for so long, placing them further & further into the minority.

Excuse the pun but let’s get something crystal clear here: 3D sound isn’t about fidelity, it’s about presence.

Stereo audio in a 3D experience like VR won’t seem lower fidelity, it will seem wrong. If sound sources move with your head opposed to locking to the environment as you move freely around the space, your sense of immersion will be lessened and the listener will fall into the audio uncanny valley.

Additionally traditional stereo will seem static, muddled & claustrophobic when compared to the much more open soundscape of 3D, similar to listening to mono after getting accustomed to stereo.

Applying that parallel to 3D music will take a bit of trial & error. Remember when the first commercially available stereo recordings in the 60’s meant guitar in the left channel, piano in the right? It was only after lots of experimentation that the stereo field finally found its ‘space’.

In current VR experiences, 3D sound is subtle because it fits so well within a 3D environment. Seeming ‘right’ only draws your attention when it’s taken away. In that respect, the majority of users won’t appreciate it until they become used to it & then go back to 2D. The user will then understand that this is a quantum leap opposed to an additive improvement.

Audiophiles traditionally emphasize fidelity over immersive context because it’s easier to quantify (96kHz > 48kHz, etc.) The problem with this is 3-fold.

1) it’s elitist.
I brought my 40 pound refurbished reel to reel player and my 7 1/2″ tape of Jimmy Hendrix Rainbow Bridge over to the house of a friend who builds custom tube amps & speakers. This is a labor of love that took time, money, physical effort & coordination. I don’t expect many people to make this sort of pilgrimage to listen to a commercial album.

2) The return on investment is diminished at best.
Listening to Rainbow Bridge was more about the ritual than the qualitative improvement. Objectively, I’d say that custom setup yielded about a 30% better listening experience than playing it on YouTube over a Labtec 2.1 system, about 15% better than a Spotify premium version over a Denon Heos & about a 5% improvement over a Cambridge Audio CD player through a Harmon Kardon amp & PSB speakers.

3) Fidelity isn’t important to the masses.
Today’s consumers value portability & access to content over fidelity. The music you listen to at the gym has 3 additional layers of data & signal compression then it did 20 years ago. MP3 compression (1) optimized for cloud streaming (2) played over Bluetooth (3) squeezes that fidelity down like a juice presser. & everyone seems fine with that.

An executive once asked me to help him price out a stereo system with his $10,000 budget. I told him if his source was either a streaming service or an MP3 library played over a 3.175mm phono jack, he should spend $2000 on a decent prosumer system & save the rest for live shows. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

So if no one cares about niche incremental fidelity improvement, how would 3D music catch on? Simple, thanks to VR / AR, it will be the price of entry for sonic content & more importantly it’ll use the same gear you already have for your HMD.

Not too many people are going to pony up for a Pono, but if you’re using headphones to experience VR, you will certainly expect music listening not to sound worse than your multimedia content over the same hardware.

What will 3D music sound like? Only time will tell. It could be like hearing the London Philharmonic Orchestra from the conductor podium or hearing Nicholas Jarr’s samples spin around you like fireflies or it could be something completely new that no one has thought of yet. We’re at the ‘guitar = left, piano = right’ stage right now.

One thing is for sure, if the future Dark Side of the Moon is released exclusively in 3D music, audiophiles can buy their high fidelity adamantium collector’s edition vinyl. The rest of us will be happy to stream it over Steam music or Spotify 3D assuming the content is just as present and the experience is just as real.